I like CPAN - because I like doing interesting programming, and CPAN deals with a lot of the dull bits :-)

I once justified doing a project in perl project solely because of the existance of DBI. We had information from N different databases / spreadsheets / weird-text-files at N different sites being integrated onto One Big Oracle Box.

The boring bit - getting so we could talk about the data from all these different sources in the same way.

DBI + standard DBDs + a couple of custom DBDs - job done.

The interesting bit (cleaning and standardising all the data from the various sources) took quite a bit more effort :-)

DBI is the best database layer I've come across in any language. Bar none. Nothing else in my experience even comes close.